Rolling with the punches

Ever have one of those kind of weeks where at the end of it you have nothing clean to wear and your to-do list has grown rather than shrunk even though you were so busy you are sleep deprived?  No?  If you haven't let me share what you are missing out on!

Mine started on Wednesday as I drove home from the gym on a night I am usually driving the dance taxi for Big Sister blissfully enjoying our week of Spring Break from both dance and school.  I'd just done a killer uphill run and felt amazing with both girls in the car headed for home and bed.  And then my phone rang the sexy ringtone for Hubby who was calling with week-changing news.  His Dad, who lives hundreds of miles away, is delivering trailers all over the country to satisfy his gypsy blood without having to sacrifice his homestead or retirement and would be arriving at our place in about twelve hours on his way to Oregon.  Awesome!  We rarely get to see him... wait, what did you say?  "I'm going with him" is what he had said.  Those four little words almost destroyed my sanity and did destroy everything that resembled a schedule for the rest of the weekend.

Hubby's been working the grave shift this month which means I've gotten to see him for about fifteen minutes each morning and each evening for three to four days a week as we cross one another on our way to and from work.  Just the thought of getting to see him and have a two-parent household in the evenings for the rest of the week was the only thing keeping me together at that point of the week.  And now he's leaving in the morning with no notice?  I immediately went into psycho troubleshooting mode which came across as me being a total bitch about this amazing opportunity for him to get to spend a few days on the road with just him and his dad.  Strike one for me.

After salvaging that mis-communication and getting us both into troubleshooting mode, it became even more apparent how this was going to play out for me.... Thursday I had to work, and it was book club night, and Friday I had to work - which is the day Hubby never works so we don't have daycare, and Friday is the day I am supposed to run not once but twice as part of my Ragnar training, and it is Easter weekend...  and now you can imagine the extent of the chaos that ensued with no Hubby to help out.

Luckily my Mom is retired and loves spending time with my girls.  I feel like I use and abuse her sometimes because I know she is always available at the drop of the hat when I need her.  She was willing to extend her normal babysitting hours with the girls on Thursday to all day with a small break to go to dinner with my Dad and then come back to watch the girls until all hours of the night while I went to book club.  And our amazing nanny rearranged her schedule - two weeks before her own wedding - to spend all day with the girls on Friday so I could work. 

At that point, however, all good things planned like a nazi and executed on schedule came to a grinding halt.  Friday I got up at the ass-crack of dawn to run my first run before work with plans to rush home and rush to the gym for the second run before the daycare center at the gym closes early on Friday.  That of course didn't happen because let's face it, trying to put a 15-month old on that tight of schedule was never going to work.  My morning run sucked - apparently I have no stamina at zero dark thirty when normal people are sleeping.  Go figure.  After work, I got a rare twenty minutes of just chatting with my nanny about wedding plans that I took advantage of which put us behind schedule.  Still salvageable until my mom called with an invite to dinner which turned into "why don't you take the girls and then I won't be rushed at the gym" which took me out of rush mode.  Except then she called back saying "just kidding, I didn't know Dad had other plans".  At that point I no longer had time to get to the gym and get a run of any distance in before the kid's center closed for the evening so why bother.

Have I expressed yet how much I HATE that the kid's center closes early on Friday night?  Don't dictate to me when I should be spending time outside the gym with my kids!

We spent Friday night instead shopping for new clothes for Big Sister to wear for Easter and shoes for the nanny's wedding to match the flower girl dresses, and crap for the Easter baskets.  I guess the one good thing about Big Sister having figured out the truth behind Santa and subsequently the Easter Bunny is that - combined with Little Sister being too young to understand or remember much - I got to shop for stuff for their baskets with both of them in tow - something I wouldn't have been able to do without Hubby home that night otherwise.

The rest of the weekend rolled smoothly through and I even enlisted Big Sister to babysit for an hour while I did my missed run from Friday night on Saturday while Little Sister had her nap.  Hubby and his Dad drove sixteen hundred miles and arrived back home mid-day Saturday to sleep for about eight hours straight.  Enough for them to be well-rested and ready for dinner out followed by Easter festivities on Sunday.

Even with the second weekend in a row of doing no laundry, and no grocery shopping, I still survived the week with my sanity mostly in check thanks to the efforts of others and their willingness to step in and roll with the punches with me. Now it is time to get back to normal day to day activities which is still no easy task for this busy girl on the best of days. If you need me this week, I'll be digging myself out of piles of dirty laundry and hoping to discover hidden snippets of time to work on my damn novel... if I'm lucky!  Know what I didn't even miss once?  Facebook!